


where you stop the story

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 18:58:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1398916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You know, if you’d told me,” the Doctor says – softly, wonderingly, a bit like he’s asking the universe a question– “say, five hundred years ago, that this was where I’d end up, I’d never have believed you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	where you stop the story

Every room in the flat is full of boxes.  
  
Rose has to pick her way through them very carefully as she makes her way back out to the kitchen. Her hair is still damp from the shower, and the lingering warmth of the water makes her skip across the cold wooden floors and through the cardboard labyrinth as quickly as possible. The boxes, some of which are very precariously stacked, and all of which are labeled in one scrawly hand or another – her large, loopy letters, or the Doctor’s odd amalgamation of angular English printing and delicate, circular Gallifreyan – seem far too numerous. Rose still can’t quite wrap her mind around how many _things_ she’s acquired in the last few years, especially as she’d been trying rather hard _not_ to.  
  
The Doctor himself is where Rose left him – out on the balcony, which is the only place left in the flat where there are no boxes to clutter the floor. He’s stuck his legs through the gaps between the balcony railings, bare feet dangling in the air seventeen stories up.

  
He either doesn’t hear her crack open the sliding door to the balcony, or he just doesn’t react – either way, it’s not until she’s settled behind him on the cold concrete, arms wrapped around his waist and shorter legs bracketing his long ones, that he speaks.  
  
“You know, if you’d told me,” the Doctor says – softly, wonderingly, a bit like he’s asking the universe a question– “say, five hundred years ago, that this was where I’d end up, I’d never have believed you.”  
  
Rose hums noncommittally and tightens her arms around his waist. “And where were you five hundred years ago that London seemed so far out of reach?”  
  
The Doctor chuckles and slumps against her, just a bit, resting the weight of his upper body in the cradle of her arms. “Oh, you know. Leaping about, doing improbable things with kettles and string. Getting told off for my bad behavior by a lot of ninnies in funny hats.” He wriggles one shoulder, in a sort of halfhearted shrug. “It’s all relative, I suppose. Point is– ”  
  
The other shoulder repeats the odd shrugging motion, and the Doctor lets out a deep, heaving sigh before he speaks again. “Point is that this was always the sort of thing that happened to other people. Not to me.”  
  
“What do you mean?” She leans her head down to look at the Doctor’s face, but he keeps staring ahead at the London skyline, eyes fixed somewhere around the zeppelin closest to Westminster. “What sort of thing?”  
  
“Doors. Carpets. Mortgages.” The last is said with such exaggerated antipathy that Rose has to hold back a chuckle – this is, after all, the same man who’s spent the last two days quite enthusiastically helping her pack up _her_ flat so they can move to _their_ flat – a much bigger place that this one, that does in fact have doors, carpets, and a nice bit of garden where they can grow the TARDIS.  
  
The Doctor’s overstated disgust, however, quickly melts into something sweeter, something more like affection – affection and a little bit of awe, even, of the kind that she’s still not quite used to having directed at her. He tilts his head back and looks up at her through his lashes, eyes soft and wondering. “Love.”  
  
(He’s said it hundreds of times, now, but the force of the word hits her like a freight train every time).  
  
“So you’d have been horrified, then?” Rose asks, careful to keep her voice light, playful – not to let how much she’d like to know the answer, the _real_ one, the honest one, to that question. “To know that you’d settled down?”  
  
For a moment, the Doctor doesn’t say anything. There’s no sound except the ones the city makes – someone slamming the lid of the skip down in the alley, muffled sounds of traffic from the road. “ _Horrified_ isn’t quite right,” he finally says, stretching the word out longer than necessary, like a piece of taffy. “I just – the thought really wouldn’t have entered my mind.”  
  
“You didn’t do this sort of thing.” It’s not a complaint; it’s a statement of fact.  
  
He shakes his head, less as a _no_ and more as _not quite_. “I just – didn’t think I’d end up here. Or anywhere even vaguely resembling–” He gestures, a bit helplessly, out towards the city, though Rose knows he’s talking more about the flat than the city, or even the world that’s not quite theirs. He’s talking about the packages back in the flat that contain all their worldly possessions; about the shoes piled in a messy heap by the door and the lumpy mattress that they really ought to replace. About all of that, and _them_ , and this thing they’re building, together.  
  
“Does it–” Rose clears her throat unnecessarily, because it feels like there ought to be a pause here, before she says this. “Does it count as _ending up_ , really, when technically you’re still out there, somewhere?”  
  
There’s no heat in her voice – no anger, no accusation, even if there’s still a little bit of pain. That fight’s been over and done for some time now, wrapped up and packed away just as surely as the contents of her flat.  
  
(That’s not to say they’ll never unpack it again, but not just now. Not tonight).  
  
The Doctor is quiet, for a few long, still moments. “Happy endings,” he finally says, without looking at her, “depend entirely on where you stop the story.”  
  
“And you’re stopping here?” Rose loosens one hand from around his waist and slides it into the hair at the nape of his neck. The Doctor makes a deep humming noise and tilts his head back into her touch.  
  
“Well,” the Doctor says. “No. Not really. Couldn’t stop it if I tried. It’ll keep going on whether I like it or not.”  
  
“But,” he continues brightly, “Sort of, yes. This is where we’ll end it, Rose Tyler. Story of you and me. Right here on this balcony.”  
  
“And it’s a happy ending, is it?”  
  
The Doctor grabs the hand that’s still on his waist with one of his. His skin is cold and work-rough, chilled from the night air and rubbed raw from two days of packing and taping and fetching and carrying. She twines her fingers with his anyways.  
  
“Yes,” he says. “It is.”


End file.
